The African-Canadian male depicted in George Elliott Clarke’s most recent novel, The Motorcyclist, is a multitude of things. He’s a rider of a gleaming BMW motorcycle, his transportation mode of choice in navigating the highways and backroads of Canada’s East Coast in the 1950s. He is highly intelligent, but prone to venturing down the path of least resistance. He’s also a working class man with a near-ravenous sexual appetite; the novel throughline is structured around Carl’s conquests.

Most of all, he’s loosely based on Clarke’s real father, William Lloyd Clarke — inspired by a journal the author found soon after his father’s death, which revealed a different person than the one he thought he knew. The story is neither biography or history, Clarke insists at the start, but the compelling fictional protagonist Carl Black shares many traits with his real dad.

Clarke’s second novel, set in 1950s Nova Scotia, is a love letter of sorts to the Maritimes. Contrary to what many people may believe, there were folks of African descent in Canada well before the major Trudeaumania influx of immigrants in the late-60s early 70s. Clarke’s own Canadian heritage runs seven generations deep. He was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, adjacent to the burgeoning Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains, in 1960, and his book highlights a time where Canadians of black heritage scrapped, struggled, yet ultimately survived during an era where the nation itself was shaking out its own post-war identity.

It is an understatement to say that Clarke is distinguished. Recently named Canada’s parliamentary poet laureate, he is a professor of literature at the University of Toronto, an officer of the Order of Canada and he was the 2015 Poet Laureate of Toronto. The novel’s literary prose reveals the author’s poetic penchant, with florid text that at times vaguely threatens to give way to puffery.

The book leverages a refined technique that presents the dusky broad strokes of Carl’s countless adventures, craftily keeping plot and dialogue to a minimum. It takes us into his intelligent yet conflicted mind, a morass of morality, desire and slightly skewed sense of honour. Carl’s truths are venerated, capitalized and italicized concepts of Violence, Lust, Delight and Truth, as he attempts to reconcile his life of drudgery as an employee of the Canadian National Railway with his wanderlust: Life is as harrowing as a miscarriage, Carl argues at one point in the book.

The novel teases and titillates; each encounter is sketched in ribald detail. It must have been strange for Clarke to imagine these paternal peccadilloes. Horny in Halifax, is Carl. Throughout his road travels, white Canadian women are often objects of Black’s desire. They are there to be coveted, and sleeping with them represents a freewheeling personal victory over the systemic racism he faces. But it’s not without a cost. “My loving has hurt women,” Carl admits along the way.

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Clarke is fearless in his depiction of how our bloodlines shape us but don’t ultimately define us. Carl is no saint, but he contains a vestigial goodness evident as he zooms around the Canadian landscape, in search of himself and his destiny. Indeed, all of the characters in The Motorcyclist are inscrutably detailed, conflicted in their principles, and hew to their baser natures when confronted with hard choices. Carl never knew his father — a Caribbean migrant who skipped town after Carl’s birth — and has a tumultuous relationship with his mother, a proud, pragmatic washerwoman who did what — and who — she had to do to ensure a life for her brood.

The novel is subtly subversive in the sense of how it capably fleshes out not just a black man, but a man who happens to be black, a vital cultural distinction that lends the novel an air of uncompromising universality. Using the social tensions of the ’50s and ’60s — with the civil rights touchstones being American entities Martin Luther King and Malcolm X — the story shines a light on how much class defines us, nearly as much as race does. Most of all, it posits that African-Canadian literature is Canadian literature.

The Motorcyclist functions as a quintessential Canadian novel, to be consumed by Canadians of all stripes while it drives home hard truths on what it meant — and still often means — to zoom along life’s path as a person of colour in contemporary Canada.

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